how it smells outside

the sun finally came out. today it was hot. after lunch with all the women in the centro i sat outside on the ground and it smelled like the sun on the hot ground mixed with the wood fires being burned for cooking in some of the houses around the office and it was the best thing i’ve smelled since i’ve been here (except for the bakery by my house when i walk by it in the mornings. it’s like you’re surrounded by a cloud of butter and sugar. incredible.)

today was good, except that i am exhausted from all of the agua de caña of last night. on my way to workl i went by pronatura, where a friend works, two blocks from my house, and you would never know it from the street, but it’s beautiful inside, totally filled with flowers and plants like a jungle and almost more of an awesome and peaceful refuge from the bustling streets here than the buddhist center was before Angie left. anyways i know two guys that work there doing conservation stuff, one of them, eric, is really into birds and studies their habits and migration patterns and stuff and how certain industrial projects screw up their lives. he’s really passionate about it, which is rad…and we’re going out to dinner wednesday night which should be pretty great.

tomorrow i’m going back to oventic to talk to the junta del buen gobierno, the zapatista government, about my project and get permission from them to do some interviews. nervous! i have to get up at 6 am to get there at 8 for an all day workshop with Promedios and to talk with the junta and hopefully do some interviews.

other news…hmmm. oh, excited because one of the women i work with in the Centro is going to teach me to make tamales before i leave…and what else…i am learning how to cook everything with chile and to make artesanales, bracelets and things. starting to really love manu chao. having people over to the house more, now that i feel comfortable there and with my work schedule and stuff. oh, and i have a new head full of pink hair, finally found the dye i’ve been looking for three weeks.

not much else is new. i am really looking forward to going to maine with my family and sophie in a week, but sad about leaving. on the way, though, we’ll go see the joseph cornell exhibit at the peabody museum in Boston, which’ll make my summer, practically. rad.

oh, and i discovered queso oaxaceña. it’s like queso fresco except also like string cheese. it’s AMAZING.

love from san cris.

gracias a la vida

these days it’s raining every day at 2 or 3 pm. it keeps going on and off into the night. it smells good and is gorgeous because it’s misty and dreamlike as it tends to be when it rains during the day, which makes up for its inconvenience.

feels like I’ve been on a long, long trip that was almost a dream. I went to the intergalactico, and it was amazing, although I have had long talks with friends about the issues we would raise in planning another. However, it was an amazing experience, You get there, to Oventic, and you can feel resistance and collectivity in the air. There are these gorgeous hand painted banners just billowing in the wind and SO many people and once the guards at the gate let you pass you walk down this huge walkway lined with collectives (coffee, weaving, etc) and meeting spaces and comedores. I really wish I hadn’t gotten sick and somewhat defeated by all the alternating burning sun and pouring freezing rain, because I feel like it was an amazing opportunity to exchange a ton with la gente, all the people there…A compartir…The English words don’t work as well as the Spanish ones seem to. But anyway I went and it was great. And I got to interview a darling woman in one of the weaving collectives there, Subcomandante Marcos came and spoke about the Yaki pueblo in the north and their struggle for autonomy, there were amazing mesas de trabajo on the Zapatista health system, and on women’s struggle within the larger Zapatista struggle, and so much more. Oventic’s about 1.5 hours away from San Cristobal, we got there crammed 6 into a taxi on the winding roads with breathtaking scenery all around. We came back in the back of a truck, much cheaper and made more friends that way, the whole thing in the open air, and we just beat the rain!

When I got back I was feeling ok, went to call family and do some work in Tierra Adentro. A few hours later, though, when I got home from the café, I could barely stand up. I made myself a grilled cheese and tomato sandwich and went straight to bed for three days, alternately freezing cold and then sweating from the heat, with a terrible headache, cough and nausea. The whole time, because of where I live, in this insane beautiful yellow and orange commune/house/hostel/squat, there were more than 10 argentine, Mexican and French hippies banging away on their bongos right above my room on the roof and in the courtyard singing at the top of their lungs as they polished off a HUGE bag of mushrooms that they found a couple days earlier in the campo. This trip of theirs lasted about two straight days, with me getting out of bed every 10 hours or so to feebly ask them to keep it down until my fever broke. Awful! And two or three days later, it did, and I took a shower and did all the dishes they left in the sink and felt a little better. I finally got back to work. In the course of my flu, I watched a trillion movies (storytelling, and the squid and the whale), slept more than I have the whole time I’ve been here, read (now obsessed with Marquez!) and wished my mom was here. Today is my first day back at the Centro, and, although I am mostly better, I have a terrible sinus cold and my stomach was killing me this morning. At least I can walk places again.

also, i’ve been feeding myself well. lots of cooking with bags full of acelago (like chard) and tomatoes and avocado. and I finally understand the culture of maiz a little better. It’s not just like bread for us…it’s everything. The indigenous people are mujeres y hombres de maiz…the tortillas, the ejote and esquite …corn on the cob with chile, or the kernels cooked with salt, chile and a million other things all on layers…tamales…corn bread…more tortillas…oh, and a hot sweet drink made of pureed corn. Oh, and that soup, white and creamy…and probably a million other things I can’t think of right now. And the husks don’t go to waste either. I mean, I only had an inkling of an idea before…So much to absorb! I have to teach myself to like corn tortillas more than flour, which are only sold packaged in stores. It’s hard, been raised on flour ones my whole life! but the real tortillas are where it’s at, hot and sold in kilos and fresh wrapped in paper from the tortilleria and that you brush off in your palms and then roll up into a little tube to eat with, kind of like the white bread you get at the barbecue in atlanta when you’re little…

love,
leah

all the rain

so the fake two weeks of sun have come to an end and now i really understand the south mexican rainy season-it’s all the time. and my only pair of sneakers is wet so i walk around slipping and falling everywhere in my flip flops! or, a lo mejor, barefoot with the whole world laughing because who walks barefoot in san cristobal?

but it’s lovely purple-y grey blue clouds and steamy mountains rising up all around this tiny town in the altos of Chiapas. i am definitely enjoying the beautiful days although i am inside a lot. tonight i am going to a little film festival in TierrAdentro cafe, on autonomy and the right to indigenous people’s rights to the land. Tomorrow and thursday I will be in the escuela de las promotoras de derechos humanos de la mujer, taking notes for them. tomorrow night i meet up with the father of one of my close friends from Chile, who is Mexican, and lives here in San Cris. We’ll go out with his friend who is a blues musician, and his friend’s whole family. and then it’s off to the encuentro intergalactica zapatista for as long as i can take off my work here. So incredible to be two days away from a round table with Subcomandante Marcos and co.! Wow.

As for the artesano, creo k ya se acabo…There are a million gorgeous people here, all incredibly dedicated to la lucha, and I want to learn more than “how much my eyes say,” etc. etc. Anyways i need to go meet up with my friends from the Buddhist Center here, really neat hippie chav@s that are very in touch with themselves…more soon.

PS: Skip this if you want, but, my research proposal in case anyone’s interested?
************
As new NAFTA-modeled free trade agreements for Latin America continue to dominate US political discourse, the effects of NAFTA are still being felt on the ground and especially in Mexico. This agreement seems to disproportionately affect underrepresented groups such as indigenous Maya women. What are the continuing effects of NAFTA on Maya women, and what do their grassroots responses say about the successes and shortcomings of this agreement? To determine the continuing effects of these neoliberal policies on women, I will investigate this question and relevant sub-questions though primary source gathering and oral interview methodology, later sharing the results with academic and activist audiences so that they might be communicated directly to the US in a visual way. The interviews will be approached with a third wave feminist perspective; however, the political sphere will not be overlooked in this investigation. These reports from the ground aim to be a basis for the masses of people in the US to judge for themselves the success and shortcomings of a hotly debated free trade agreement that effectively opened up Mexico to the neoliberal system and a increasingly globalized world. Although this sort of exercise has been performed before, the increasing relevance of NAFTA years later as a model of success makes it crucial for us to reexamine sectors of Mexican society that are often overlooked even by important provisions such as labor protections. Special attention will be paid to women-initiated grassroots responses to the effects of NAFTA and their continuing means and goals. Close attention will also be paid to the Zapatista movement during the Aniversario de los Caracoles and to its focus on (women) soldaderas and woman-led action.

soy de la tierra

well, at least that’s a looming possiblity as i stop shaving again, grow out my hair and start wearing oversize cotton embroidered dresses, feather earrings and sandals made from recycled tires. and relaxing mexican style, if you know what i mean. i think i am definitely a giant hippie at heart. it’s easier to immerse yourself in that if you don’t have a car, cell phone or real schedule and find yourself buying bags full of vegetables in the open air market every week. sigh…

 it’s gonna be a sharp pain deep in my stomach when i leave. i bought my ticket for august 9th, yesterday afternoon. what a drag.

¡the II encuentro intergalático va! it starts the 20th and lasts a week. i am SO busy here that i don{t know how much i can go, but i registered and am definitely going to the panels on women. ahh!

Hello world!

sooo much life in these parts.

the air here in san cristobal de las casas, chiapas (mexico…come on…) is like butter made from the sun and you can smell it spread over the rooftops that are thatched and mud red.

i work all day in two different NGOs, promedios and the center for chiapan women’s rights. it’s a 9 to 8 kinda thing. and i cook a lot and go out A LOT, until the sun comes up. meeting all sorts of amazing people and not sleeping. my yerba mate is the only thing keeping me going.

my project is on the effects of NAFTA in communities of indigenous women, and, moreover, what those women (being, i hypothesize, the most adversly affected by free trade and neoliberalism) are developing not in opposition, per se, to neoliberalism but as alternatives to it. it’s all being approached from a third wave feminist perspective without, hopefully, overlooking the political sphere by focusing too much on identity, but still recognizing the inherent importance of communicating what these women have to say. their voices aren’t being heard enough.

soon, the aniversario de los (zapatista) caracoles will happen. floods of people will be here. it’ll be overwhelming and amazing at the same time.

tomorrow i move to a room that i am renting for a month. it’s in a cute, open air house sort of thing that’s more of a house full of people than a hostel, no door person or staff but a bazillion beds and a sweet kitchen, maybe more like a commune or something. all of the houses here have courtyards, which makes me really happy. that’s how it should always be, i think.

i met a gorgeous artesano that has long long long dreadlocks and, supposedly, aztec blood, and one set of clothes and makes jewelry that he sells on the street in whichever city he happens to be in at the time. he just does what he wants, kind of moving where ever the wind blows. his name is omartsin and he does installation and sculpture and painting and is amazing. but being an artesano, he picks up and leaves whenever he feels like it without a word. hope he’ll come back soon. he says my eyes say much more than i do. probably true. i think he’s in the caribbean right now? or maybe guatemala? man, you guys should see me since he left. what a mess! that’s what they do to you, though. you realize what the boys in the states don’t ever say or do and it’s very clear what you’ve been missing. no offense.

also met various other wandering boys that play music and live for it and are from ireland. yikes. romance overload! i really just want to work hard and help as much as i can and learn, so maybe no more for awhile. we’ll see.

i a happy if tired. i spend so much time on my project but i am also living life as hard as i can and loving it.

i forgot how much i miss almuerzo and sitting around the table at home for 3 hours drinking beer and eating home cooked food in the middle of the day. it’s a good thing to be together. more and some photos, soon!

xoxo
leah hope